Suriname | Lingoblog

From Kortrijk to the Caribbean: the significance of a final -t

13/03/2026 by Joost Roger Robbe

Some linguistic features are striking and unmistakable. Others are so subtle that outsiders barely notice them – while insiders hear them instantly. A t-sound at the end of a word can be one of those features. It may seem insignificant, yet it can signal where you are from, where you belong, even who you are.

In Dutch, final –t is a fragile consonant. In everyday speech, it is often dropped altogether: Dutch speakers say nie instead of niet ‘not’, wa instead of wat ‘what’, and da instead of dat ‘that’. No speaker deletes every final –t, but no one keeps them all either.

This type of deletion is often associated with informality in Standard Dutch. But it … ↪

The role of extinct languages in the Venezuela-Guyana conflict

12/12/2023 by Peter Bakker

We could hear it in the news. Venezuela claims a part of its neighboring country Guyana because it wants to have the oil. Greed. Power. imperialism. The population agrees with the president’s and government’s idea that a piece of Guyana actually belong to them. Hopefully this will not lead to an invasion, a special military operation or a war, or whatever such actions are called these days.

It is not well known that there was a dispute about the border before. A committee that worked on the border dispute came with its judgement in 1899, largely in favor of Britain (at that time it was British Guyana, the country is independent since 1966). The international commission was installed to study … ↪